The Game

in or what age or class or race of woman I wastalking to, the game always worked. Besides, I had nothing to lose by gaming Britney Spears. The interview couldn’t get any more boring. Maybe I’d even get a decent quote I could actually print.
    I folded my list of questions and put them in my back pocket. I had to treat her like any club girl with attention deficit disorder.
    The first move was to hook her attention.
    “I’ll tell you something about yourself that other people probably don’t know,” I began. “People sometimes see you as shy or bitchy offstage, even though you aren’t.”
    “Totally,” she said.
    “Do you want to know why?”
    “Yeah.” I was creating what’s called a yes-ladder, capturing her attention by asking questions that require an obvious affirmative answer.
    “I’m watching your eyes when you talk. And every time you think, they go down and to the left. That means you’re a kinesthetic person. You’re someone who lives in her feelings.”
    “Oh my God,” she said. “That’s totally true.”
    Of course it was. It was one of the value-demonstrating routines I’d developed. The eye goes to one of seven different positions when someone thinks: Each position means the person is accessing a different part of their brain.
    As I taught her how to read different types of eye movements, she clung to every word. Her legs uncrossed and she leaned in toward me.
    The game was on.
    “I didn’t know this,” she said. “Who told you this?”
    I wanted to tell her, “A secret society of international pickup artists.”
    “It’s something I observed from doing lots of interviews,” I answered. “In fact, by watching the direction peoples’ eyes move when they speak, you can tell whether they’re telling the truth or not.”
    “So you’re going to know if I’m lying?” She was looking at me entirely differently now. I wasn’t a journalist anymore. I was someone she could learn from, someone who offered value. I had demonstrated authority over her world.
    “I can tell from your eye movements, from your eye contact, from the way you speak, and from your body language. There are many different ways to tell.”
    “I need to do psychology classes,” she said, with endearing earnestness.“That would be so interesting to me, studying people.” It was working. She was opening up. She kept talking and talking: “And you could meet somebody or be out on a date and be like, ‘Are they lying to me right now?’ Oh my gosh.”
    It was time to pull out the heavy artillery.
    “I’ll show you something really cool and then we’ll get back to the interview,” I said, throwing in a time constraint for good measure. “It’ll be an experiment. I’m going to try to guess something that’s in your thoughts.”
    Then I used a simple psychological gambit to guess the initials of an old friend she had an emotional connection to—someone I wouldn’t know and hadn’t heard of. The initials were G. C. And I got one letter out of two correct. It was a new routine I was still learning, but it was good enough for her.
    “I can’t believe you did that! I probably have so many walls in front, so that’s why you didn’t get them both,” she said. “Let’s try it one more time.”
    “This time, why don’t you try it?”
    “I’m scared.” She put her knuckle in her mouth and pinched the skin between her teeth. She had great teeth. They really were a perfect C-shape. “I can’t do that.”
    She was no longer Britney Spears. She was just a one-set, a lone target. Or, as Robert Greene would classify her in his breakdown of seducer’s victims, she was the lonely leader.
    “We’ll make it easier,” I said. “I’m going to write down a number. And it’s a number between one and ten. What I want you to do is not to think at all. You need to trust your instincts. There’s no special ability required to read minds. Just quiet your internal chatter and really listen to your feelings.”
    I wrote a number on a piece of paper and handed it to her face down.
    “Now, tell me,” I said, “the first number that you feel.”
    “What if it’s wrong?” she asked. “It’s probably wrong.”
    This was what we called in the field an LSE girl—she had low self-esteem.
    “What do you think it is?”
    “Seven,” she said.
    “Now, turn over the paper,” I told her.
    She slowly turned it over, as if she were afraid to look, then moved it up to eye level and saw a big number seven